Arcadia's Gift - By Jesi Lea Ryan Page 0,29
middle of typing a writing assignment when my cell phone rang. I rubbed my eyes, strained from staring at a computer screen in the fading evening light. I flipped on my desk lamp and checked the caller ID. Bronwyn.
“So my parents wanted me to ask you...” she said, her tone dripping with reluctance, “The topic for Youth Group this week is Placing Your Sorrow on Jesus, like about dealing with grief when you lose a loved one, and they want me to invite you to come. There will be a guest speaker from Grace Christian who’ll be talking about the loss of his daughter from cancer and then a group discussion.”
“I don’t know, Bron,” I sighed and tried my best to be polite. “You know how I am about the religious stuff. And I’m not sure I want to work on my grief issues in a room with a bunch of kids I don’t know.”
“Oh, you are already going to a support group meeting up at the hospital? Too bad they meet on the same night.”
Ah, I get it. One or both of her parents were standing over her making her call me. This kind of thing happened a couple of times a year, usually to invite me to a Youth Group social function or to a church service they thought might be of particular interest to me. Her parents felt it was the duty of all true Christians to “shepherd non-believers into the loving arms of the Lord” or some crap like that. As if for every person you converted you got bonus points on God’s Great Scoreboard. I don’t know, maybe they would win some prize when they got to heaven like a golden harp or a cloud with a view of the Grand Canyon. Being such a good friend, I decided to mess with her.
“Sure, Bron, I’d love to attend! I’ll wear my leather teddy and carry a riding crop. Think a studded dog collar would be too much?”
There was a slight pause before she replied, “It’s okay if you break down and cry. That’s what support groups are for. I’m sure no one will fault you for getting snot all over your sleeve.” I heard a murmured hiss in the background telling her to be more sensitive. I laughed.
“They say emotional trauma can cause teens to act out in inappropriate ways, but I would have given the football team blow jobs anyway. After all, they did beat Davenport last week.”
Bronwyn made a choking sound like she swallowed a laugh and quickly covered it with a fake cough. “Well, okay, Cady, I’ll talk to you tomorrow then. Bye.”
I hung up the phone, my grin fading. I missed my best friend. The few times I saw her since the accident, her discomfort had been obvious. Bronwyn was great listener, but not so great at knowing what to say in awkward situations. I guess talking to me qualified as awkward now.
I opened a new window on my screen, and signed into Facebook. I’d been avoiding social media since the accident because I didn’t really want to read the outpouring of sympathy from my classmates on my Facebook wall. It’s not that I didn’t appreciate the thoughts, I just couldn’t deal with it all yet. A couple of days after the accident I posted a short thank you, and hadn’t looked at it since. I wondered what the protocol was for deleting Lony’s page. I could probably do it myself. She had never been very creative with passwords, and I’m sure I’d be able to hack it inside of five minutes, but was that right? Maybe Facebook has some sort of death cancellation policy where my parents could call them to delete the account.
Once Facebook loaded, I clicked over to Bronwyn’s wall and left a message for her to meet me after she got off school tomorrow. It was time for me to start getting out of the house more.
That night as I was changing into my pj's for bed, Bryan phoned. Three nights in a row? He asked me about my day, and without planning to, I began telling him the story of Lucy and the mass in her lung.
"Are you sure you didn't feel a lump or something? Maybe something small enough that the doctor didn't notice?"
"I'm sure," I insisted. "It wasn't a lump at all. It was a vibration. And cold. You know, way cooler than the other skin around it. I thought I could hear it,